Posts Tagged ‘methodology’

Planet is hosting a symposium at CAL’09 tomorrow. If you’re in Brighton, drop in and join the discussion. Our plan is to break away from the usual talking heads format, and devote most of the time for conversation. We’ve set up a web-space for the symposium at:

Where you can find drafts of all the slideshows and a few position papers. We’ve also posted some questions for the panel discussion, and you can add some of yours – either as comments on that page or as tweets tagged #cal09ptns.

We’ve managed to bring together some of the top innovators in design pattern approaches to education and e-learning across Europe, so we look forward to be surprised and having our preconceptions challenged.

We have produced a short video which provides an overview of the project and our methodology. Many thanks to the EXTEND project for their assistance in developing this and to Jakki Sheridan-Ross for her production. Enjoy!

The EXTEND project is hosting a mini-Planet workshop on Tuesday lunchtime from 12.30 UK time – full details in Cristina’s post. All welcome – we will be sharing examples of successful practice and discussing the Planet methodology.

I’m in the process of writing a script for our short Planet video and have been pondering on both the practice and the theory of the workshops model. We have defined it as a three-workshop model: cases to candidate patterns; candidate patterns to patterns; patterns applied to scenarios. But there seems to be a fourth activity that we have all done – which doesn’t seem to fit well into this model: mapping patterns. Whether that is attempting to develop a community language or attempting to map patterns to an existing structure, this has been a core activity in several workshops. So do we actually have a four workshop model?

I suspect part of the answer is that the boundaries are fluid – a “workshop” is not necessarily a discrete event but a collection of activities that might actually take place over the course of a number of face to face meetings – and, conversely, different groups will work at different speeds and may combine elements of several workshops into one meeting. But the fact remains that there are four distinct activities – and, unless we find the holy grail of a single organising structure, all four will generally be needed. At the moment I am putting mapping and use together – but maybe we need a four phase process?

In Edinburgh (Heriot-Watt, to be percise) on the other hand, we managed to discuss case stories and derive two patterns in a single day. It might be down to having a longer workshop, or to the fact that computer scientists are more comfortable with the whole design pattern concept.

Let’s say you know how to write a case story, and we’ve convinced you that stories are not enough. But how do you get from a story to a pattern? Well, hopefully by March we’ll have something of an answer to that. In the meanwhile, here’s a tutorial that just might help:

One of the issues that came up at the recent formative e-assessment workshops was the disparate interpretations of Case Study. This led to the production of our tutorial. But it also got me thinking, maybe we can do better by a change of name. If we talk of “case stories” or “case narratives”, would that clarify what we’re looking for?

When we engage with practitioners, the first thing we ask them is for a case study. That seems to be an overloaded, somewhat obscure creature. We think we know exactly what it means, or at least what we’re looking for, but it turns out that the term is so widely used in so many ways, that it can go any odd way. Often people bring their personal statement of beliefs and achievements. In other cases, they will give a marketing presentation of their project or institution. All we really want is a good story. Believe me – that’s pretty close to the best place to start a discussion, which is what Planet is all about…

We developed the S.T.A.R.R template, which we provided as a powerpoint template and as an online form. That helped, but usually only after some verbal introduction. So here’s that introduction as a (hopefully) free-standing, self-explanatory slide deck:

Please let us know how to improve it..

(And if you’re struggling with the more technical issues, there’s the help page. )